Dedicated to those who were given birth before 1980!!!

The truth is that I do not know how we managed to survive all these years. We are the pending generation, we lived our childhood waiting for: two hours after eating to swim, two hours midday sleep to get rest, and during Sundays we should wait foodless until we were given the Eucharist. Even when we were in pain, waiting was the suggested cure.

Recollecting the past, it is difficult to believe that we are still alive. We used to travel in cars without seat belts and airbags!!! We were travelling for 10 and 12 hours, five individuals in a small Fiat and we never suffered from any kind of syndrome!!! We never had special doors, windows, cupboards and safety bottles for children!!! We were riding the bicycles without helmets and protective bandages; we were hitch-hiking, riding motorcycles without license!!! Swings were made from metal and they had edgy corners!!!

Even our games were violent; we used to stay for hours building self-made cars to compete each other rolling down from hills discovering that we forgot to install brakes in our cars!!! We were playing leap frog and nobody had any kind of orthopaedic problems (amazing)!!! We were running out of our house playing all day long and we never returned back home before we get exhausted!!! No one could find us and we never get lost or kidnapped (wow)!!! We were breaking our bones and teeth in the absence of custody laws and nobody ever got charged for it!!! We were playing war games with wooden guns, stones and mud and we used to hit our heads several times per day!!! The magic medicine of those days was the iodine tinctures some stitches and a newspaper on top!!! Nobody was blaming anybody else apart himself!!! We had strong fights and we were jeering each other forgetting everything with a magic way!!! We were eating candies and we were drinking refreshments but we were not obese or fat!!! Some of us might be a bit over weighted but nobody cared. We were using the same bottles, we were drinking the same water, and refreshments and nobody had problems of catching a virus (a nightmare)!!! We used to share our crab louses in the school and our mother confronted this problem by just washing our heads with vinegar…

We never had playstation, or Nintendo 64, or 99 TV channels, video tapes, DVD, Dolby surround audio, pc, laptops and internet (a real hell)!!! We just had friends (f-r-i-e-n-d-s)!!! We were talking to each other and we were wandering around to solve the universal problems (and we did)!!! Sometime we just met each other in the roads hiding, running or just flirting(you know a girl and a boy…)!!! We had lost thousands of footballs, we were drinking water form the faucets –some of us literary touching our tongues to the faucet- and not a bottled one from a spring in Alps(how inappropriate)!!! We were chasing lizards and birds with our air-guns, and we were never accused as criminals. We were alone in the country and although we were under aged no adults were supervising us… oh God!!!
We were communicating shouting each other or just ridding our bicycles to our friends’ houses. Imagine we never had mobil phones and we were never asking our parents permission to play around, all alone out there… in this cruel world… without any adult to be responsible for our actions… how we ever made it!!!

In school everybody was participating in the games we were playing and those of us who were cut off, we just had to live with it and not visit the first pedo-psychiatrist!!! Some of us were not so good students and had to repeat the course, there were no special tests to force them pass the course… how horrible!!!

We were on vacations for three months every summer spending 16 hours in the beach without sun care cream with protection index of 70 we were not taking lessons of sailing, tennis or golf. We were building imaginary castles in the sand and we were fishing using hooks… and fishing lines… We were flirting and groping girls, physically without being accused for sexual harassment, and not by chatting in a chat room using idiot signs like J, ;-), : D : P, lol, gg

We were free to fail, to succeed, to be responsible or irresponsible and through this process we learned and grew up. No wonder why nowadays children are so immature spoiled and slap happy. If you are though one of the “old fashioned” and you grew up in similar ways… congratulations… you had the opportunity to grow up as a human being… a child…